That practice has extended into the digital age. Final Fantasy games always end with a battle against a) someone who wants to be a god, b) someone pretending to be a god, or c) a god. And invariably — even though these omnipotent foes have 45-zillion “hit points” (ah, the hit point: irreducible unit of life in RPGs) — you end up killing them.

Matt writes:

Reducing deities to game terms (which bear a striking resemble to legal language) is a sure way to suck all the life and mystery out of an encounter with the divine. For a certain style of play, this degree of specificity can be useful — but I vastly prefer the approach that says, “The gods work in mysterious ways. Mortals cannot fathom their powers and practices.”

What would a game with truly mysterious gods look like? Here’s a notion: There’d be conversation, not combat. You wouldn’t kill God; you’d trick Him, or make a deal with Her.

You know, like in Greek mythology. People were always yanking Zeus’s chain, right? And setting up weird bets with Hades.

*Friend of Snarkmarket

Also, I would just like to say that I am really proud of the headline I came up with for this item.

Despite my disdain for overly-specific rules, they still exert a strange power. I spent a good half-hour after that post working out a table for precisely how many worshippers a deity would need to achieve each rank of power, with a smoothly-scaling rate of increase from 250 to 5 million over 20 ranks. It was immensely satisfying.